[In the following essay, which introduced her translation of The Two Shizukas, Mueller examines Zeami's treatment of the tragic character Shizuka in light of other depictions of this traditional figure. In this reprinting, ideographic characters have been silently deleted.]

Futari Shizuka (The Two Shizukas), by Kanze Motokiyo Zeami, 1363-1443, is a play of the third, or woman, category. Like many other works of the noh repertory, it is based on events in the war between the Minamoto and the Taira clans, 1180-1185, and its aftermath.¹ The Minamoto hero, Yoshitsune, 1159-1189, flees from the forces of his half-brother, Yoritomo, 1147-1199, who suspects him of treachery. He tries to sail south from the main island of Japan, but his boat is blown back to shore. Later in his flight Yoshitsune is obliged to abandon his beloved mistress, Shizuka, at Yoshino.² His travels finally take him to the north of Japan. At Koromogawa³ Yoshitsune is attacked by Yoritomo's forces and commits suicide after first killing his wife and children.

Although separated from Yoshitsune, Shizuka is also a fugitive, and Yoritomo intensifies his pursuit when he learns that she is carrying his half-brother's child. He has her brought to Kamakura, and when she gives birth to a son, Yoritomo has the child killed to deprive Yoshitsune of male heirs. Even before she met Yoshitsune, Shizuka had acquired a reputation as a shirabyōshi⁴ dancer. Aware of her fame, attracted by her beauty, and jealous of her love for Yoshitsune, Yoritomo orders her to dance for him, even though she is grief-stricken over the death of her child. As she dances, Shizuka braves Yoritomo's further displeasure by reciting a poem that tells of her love for Yoshitsune.⁵ The day after the performance she returns to Kyoto and becomes a nun at the age of nineteen. She apparently dies a year later.

Shizuka is a touching and memorable figure in her own right and also adds an important dimension to the character of Yoshitsune. He is a larger-than-life personage. We know that this hero loves Shizuka, but we are more likely to see the hero than the lover. Shizuka, through her intense devotion to Yoshitsune, suggests the more human side of his character. He is a man worth loving as well as worth admiring. His affairs with other women are of no account to Shizuka. Her entire world is defined by Yoshitsune, and his tragedy becomes hers. For Shizuka, the worst of fates is to be separated from him. It is her recollection of their parting at Yoshino, and of the misfortunes that later befell them, that makes Futari Shizuka such a poignant play. We see that even after her death Shizuka thinks only of Yoshitsune.

The Shizuka of Futari Shizuka is not a complex character, but her tragic association with Yoshitsune provided a wealth of material for Japanese dramatists through the ages. The fact that she was a dancer admirably suited the needs of the noh theater. The play Shōzon, which may have been written by Zeami,⁶ portrays Shizuka as the famous dancer who entertains Yoshitsune's treacherous guest, Tosabō Shōshun (Shōzon), and then helps Yoshitsune to defend himself when Shōshun attacks his Horikawa mansion at night. This event prompted Yoshitsune to fleē Kyoto, and in Funa Benkei⁷ (Benkei in the Boat), he attempts to flee south from Daimotsu no Ura.⁸ Shizuka follows him there, only to be told by Benkei that she must return to the capital. One of the highlights of this play is her dance in sorrow at parting from Yoshitsune. The central episode of Yoshino Shizuka⁹ (Shizuka at Yoshino) is the dance which Shizuka performs to delay Yoshitsune's pursuers at Yoshino. This heroine also appears in plays of the kōwakamai (ballad drama) genre such as Shizuka,¹⁰ which deals with her dance before Yoritomo in Kamakura.

As times and literary genres changed, so did the role of Shizuka. The writers of the kabuki and puppet plays of the Edo period favored complexity of plot and novelty of action. The dramatic unity of the noh play was exchanged for a proliferation of secondary plots and episodes. As a result Shizuka sometimes figured in scenes which had no relation to the legend of Yoshitsune. This is true of those portions of Yoshitsune Sembonzakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees)¹¹ in which Shizuka is in the company of the fox-spirit double of Yoshitsune's retainer, Satō Tadanobu. In some cases, Shizuka was central to only one or two episodes in a play. In the first act of Yoshitsune Tsuizen Onnamai (The Women's Dance for the Repose of Yoshitsune's Spirit),¹² Shizuka organizes a dance in memory of her lover, but the remaining four acts of the play deal with the unrelated vendetta of the Soga brothers.

This play also reflects another trend in the portrayal of Shizuka, namely, the creation of new episodes in her life. We can see this in a work such as Futari Shizuka Tainaisaguri (Fathoming the Offspring of the Two Shizukas),¹³ 1713, in which Shizuka's infant son is saved from death by the substitution of another woman's baby. Some plays turned to the fantastic. Such is the case with Kitsune Shizuka Keshō Kagami (The Make-up Mirror of the Fox Shizuka),¹⁴ 1872, in which a fox-spirit double of Shizuka raises Yoshitsune's son after the parents' death. Other works were less whimsical. In the shosagoto, or dance drama, Kurama Jishi (The Kurama Lion Dance),¹⁵ 1777, the heroine wanders about disconsolately on Mt Kurama after Yoshitsune's death. One of his men has been following her disguised as an itinerant player. Unaware of his identity, Shizuka has him do a lion dance to summon up Yoshitsune's spirit. As she watches, she grows so agitated in her desire to see Yoshitsune that the dancer is forced to flee, leaving her alone with her madness and sorrow.

These novel approaches to the story of Shizuka had the effect of breaking the intimate connection between her tragedy and Yoshitsune's tragedy that appears so clearly in the noh plays. With the change in the nature of dramatic action, which sometimes verged on melodrama, the immediate situation in which Shizuka finds herself is often of greater interest and concern than the larger movements of her life. This in turn gave this character a measure of independence from the legend of Yoshitsune.

This movement away from myth continued in the twentieth century. Mori Ōgai, 1862-1922, for instance, wondered why Shizuka chose to go on living after the death of her baby and wrote the experimental symbolist play Shizuka in 1909.¹⁶ In the first scene, preparations for the murder of her child are under way, and in the second scene, Shizuka calmly discusses her motivation with the murderer. Shizuka to Yoshitsune (Shizuka and Yoshitsune)¹⁷ by Nukada Roppuku, 1890-1948, portrays Shizuka as a positive and hopeful figure determined to live through the tragedy, while Yoshitsune, overwhelmed by his fate, gives way to despair.

In plays such as these, Shizuka finally emerges as an independent figure, a complex person far different from the character whom we encounter in the noh plays. In the course of the centuries, she has been in turn a sweetly nostalgic personage, an overtly dramatic one, and a psychologically interesting one. What is constant, though, is the appeal which this character has held for Japanese dramatists from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. It has been nearly eight hundred years since Shizuka died, but her story still has the power to move us.

Futari Shizuka is performed by all schools of noh except the Hōshō school. This is because Hōshō Kurō, 1838-1917, a famous actor and sixteenth head of that school, thought it would be difficult to find two actors of sufficiently similar size and build to play the role of the two Shizukas. The present translation is based on the text of Futari Shizuka in the fourth volume of Yōkyoku Taikan, and in the first volume of Yōkyokushū.¹⁸

Notes

1. The primary sources for Futari Shizuka are Gikeiki, Heike Monogatari, and Azuma Kagami. For a survey of the legends surrounding Yoshitsune, see the introduction to the translation of Gikeiki by Helen McCullough, Yoshitsune, Stanford U.P., 1966. For works of literature about Yoshitsune, see Shimazu Hisamoto, Yoshitsune Densetsu to Bungaku, Meiji Shoin, 1935. Although more limited in scope, Iizuka Tomoichirō, Kabuki Saiken, Daiichi Shobō, 1927, is also helpful.

2. In Nara prefecture. In Yōkyoku no Furusato, Kashima Kenkyūjo Shuppankai, 1968, Kimoto Seiji, surveys the geography of noh plays. See pp. 468-71 for a discussion of Futari Shizuka and photographs of sites associated with Shizuka.

3. Some scholars think it was in the vicinity of Hiraizumi in Iwate prefecture.

4. Shirabyōshi was a popular song and dance entertainment at the end of the Heian period. It was performed by women who wore a costume, similar to that of men, consisting of a tall black hat, a white tunic, and long trousers.

5. This episode, which is so central to Futari Shizuka, is described in Gikeiki, vi, and in Azuma Kagami in the entry for Bunji 2 (1186)/4/8; for an English version, see McCullough, pp. 225-36.

   Gikeiki relates that Yoritomo, embarrassed by Shizuka's refusal to dance for him, has someone suggest to her that if she dances at the Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine in Kamakura, her prayers for a reconciliation between Yoshitsune and his half-brother will be answered. Yoritomo watches the dance from concealment. When Shizuka becomes aware of his presence, she defiantly sings of her love for Yoshitsune. The account in Azuma Kagami simply states that Yoritomo compelled Shizuka to dance for him.

   An enactment of this dance is still performed in front of Hachiman Shrine during Kamakura's annual festival.

6. The play is also ascribed by some to Kanze Yajirō Nagatoshi, d. 1541.

7. By Kanze Kojirō Nobumitsu, 1435-1516. This is perhaps the most frequently performed of all noh plays. There is also a famous adaptation of this play for the kabuki stage by Kawatake Mokuami, 1816-1893.

8. In present-day Amagasaki in Hyōgo prefecture.

9. This play is apparently an adaptation by Zeami of a work by his father, Kan'ami, which is referred to as Shizuka ga Mai no Nō (The Noh about Shizuka's Dance) in Zeami's treatise on noh, Fūshikaden. This work also states that Kan'ami was famous for his portrayal of Shizuka.

10. Shizuka, like most of the other plays in this genre, is of unknown authorship. For a study of kōwakamai, see James T. Araki, The Ballad-Drama of Japan, University of California Press, 1964.

11. By Takeda Izumo, Namiki Sōsuke, and Miyoshi Shōraku, first performed in 1747.

12. c. 1697, by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 1653-1724.

13. By Chikamatsu Monzaemon.

14. By Kawatake Mokuami. Although written at the beginning of the Meiji period, this work is in the spirit of Edo drama.

15. By Nakamura Jūsuke I, 1749-1803.

16. This play, which was first published in Subaru in 1909, is apparently the first modern historical drama to use the modern colloquial language rather than classical Japanese.

17. The play was written in 1934 and first performed in 1937. Not all 20th-century. Japanese dramatists delved into the psychological aspects of Shizuka's story. Migita Nobuhiko (also read as Torahiko), 1866-1920, whose Yoshino Shizuka appeared in 1918, wrote for the kabuki stage under the influence of Mokuami.

    Others who have written about Shizuka in this century include Sasaki Nobutsuna (Shizuka, 1933), Satō Ichi'ei (Shizuka Gozen, 1928), and Yamazaki Shikō (Shizuka Gozen, 1909).

18. Sanari Kentarō, ed., Yōkyoku Taikan, Meiji Shoin, 1930-1931, 7 vols., iv, pp. 2711-22; Koyama Hiroshi, Satō Kikuo, & Satō Ken'ichirō, ed., Yōkyokushū, Shōgakukan, 1973-1975 (nkbz 32-33), 2 vols., ii, pp. 314-23.